The desire to reduce our consumption of and dependency on fossil fuel has been largely responsible for the development of many photovoltaic materials and devices. The widespread adoption of photovoltaics as an energy source has principally been restricted by the costs and technical difficulties associated with fabricating photovoltaic cells. The energy and material costs of such cells must be recoverable in the electrical energy produced by the cells over some reasonable time frame for photovoltaic cells to be a commercially feasible energy source.
When manufacturing a typical photovoltaic cell comprising a photovoltaic material disposed between two electrodes (sandwich-type), the transparency of one or both of the electrodes to incident light can be a source of economic and technical concerns. In a sandwich-type cell at least one side of the cell is an exposure side, i.e., a side of the cell through which incident light passes to reach the photovoltaic material. As the maximum output energy of a photovoltaic material depends on the amount of incident light it receives, sandwich-type photovoltaic cells almost invariably use a semiconductor oxide film (such as, e.g., indium tin oxide) as the exposure side electrode. Although such semiconductor oxide films are relatively costly, difficult to manufacture and only semiconductors, prior art photovoltaic cells employ these films because it is generally believed and taught that their transparency, combined with conductivity is required to produce a useful photovoltaic cell.